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By Chris Brown

Repurposing for value

Costa Rican coffee collaboration broadened perspectives for MHC students

Nov 9, 2021 | 1:38 PM

MEDICINE HAT, AB – Business students at Medicine Hat College recently discovered some of the ways the benefits of coffee can extend well past their morning pick me up, and gained a new perspective by working with culinary students in Costa Rica.

At the annual Innovate Tournament students in the entrepreneurial experience class are given a piece of garbage with no value and must re-purpose it into a new product for use or sale.

“We want students to understand the idea of value, so repurposing things. We tend to usually give students a piece of garbage or something that has no value or purpose to it and then to re-innovate it or re-change it, and then re-purpose it for a value system,” explains instructor Miranda Davies. “And so Costa Rica is really into that as well, they’re very very strong on sustainability and environmentalism.”

This year the item chosen by instructors was used coffee grounds. Costa Rica is a major producer of coffee.

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The winning team’s project was Coffee Sake which used grounds for the fermenting process of making sake.

Davies says it was a brilliant idea.

“When we looked at the three-minute video, they only had three minutes to tell the entire idea to the judges and out of that three minutes they were able to show that you could sell it, how much they sold it for, they made it, how much they sold it for and then they donated it to charity. So it was really an all-around great idea.”

Other teams used the grounds to make a solution for traction in winter, to help build roads and even to make coffee cups.

Davies said working with the students in Costa Rica gave the Medicine Hat College students a different perspective.

“A lot of times we’re really used to our North American perspective and the Costa Rican students had a different look on how they would repurpose things.”

“They were much more, I think, broader-minded as opposed to sometimes we get hooked into our Canadian winters, our Canadian summers and we should be doing it this way and how we use coffee,” she continued. “Because they use it so much throughout their culture, they actually have a broader perspective on how you could make a business idea out of it.”